Open Access

ARTICLE

Reliability-Based Model for Incomplete Preventive Replacement Maintenance of Photovoltaic Power Systems

Wei Chen, Ming Li^*, Tingting Pei, Cunyu Sun, Huan Lei

School of Electrical Engineering and Information Engineering, Lanzhou University of Technology, Lanzhou, 730050, China

* Corresponding Author: Ming Li. Email:

(This article belongs to the Special Issue: Cybersecurity in Smart Grids for Sustainable Energy Management Systems)

Energy Engineering 2024, 121(1), 125-144. https://doi.org/10.32604/ee.2023.042812

Received 13 June 2023; Accepted 26 July 2023; Issue published 27 December 2023

Abstract

At present, the operation and maintenance of photovoltaic power generation systems mainly comprise regular maintenance, breakdown maintenance, and condition-based maintenance, which is very likely to lead to over- or under-repair of equipment. Therefore, a preventive maintenance and replacement strategy for PV power generation systems based on reliability as a constraint is proposed. First, a hybrid failure function with a decreasing service age factor and an increasing failure rate factor is introduced to describe the deterioration of PV power generation equipment, and the equipment is replaced when its reliability drops to the replacement threshold in the last cycle. Then, based on the reliability as a constraint, the average maintenance cost and availability of the equipment are considered, and the non-periodic incomplete maintenance model of the PV power generation system is established to obtain the optimal number of repairs, each maintenance cycle and the replacement cycle of the PV power generation system components. Next, the inverter of a PV power plant is used as a research object. The model in this paper is compared and analyzed with the equal cycle maintenance model without considering reliability and the maintenance model without considering the equipment replacement threshold, Through model comparison, when the optimal maintenance strategy is (0.80, 4), the average maintenance cost of this paper’s model are decreased by 20.3% and 5.54% and the availability is increased by 0.2395% and 0.0337%, respectively, compared with the equal-cycle maintenance model without considering the reliability constraint and the maintenance model without considering the equipment replacement threshold. Therefore, this maintenance model can ensure the high reliability of PV plant operation while increasing the equipment availability to improve the system economy.

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Keywords

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